


on the other side of night

by charcoalsuns



Category: Sayonara Heron - ymz
Genre: M/M, Non-Chronological, POV Alternating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-29
Updated: 2018-12-29
Packaged: 2019-09-29 15:49:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17206283
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/charcoalsuns/pseuds/charcoalsuns
Summary: 24.I was thinking about your happiness, Souji cannot say, when they no longer need to hold onto each other's hands. There is enough light to see by. The wind that has always circled around them is dying.I don't believe in that, Mika had said to him when they first met, both rooted in the dark, blinded by the storm.I don't, either, Souji had returned. But their limbs are free now. The storm is gone. Or, at long last, it is moving on.And so:I was thinking about your happiness, Souji cannot say, when he finds his own.





	on the other side of night

**Author's Note:**

> _Sayonara, Heron_ is one of my favorite manga, though i couldn't figure out if it affected me so much that i wanted to try to write something from it, or if it affected me so much that i only ever wanted to read it again. 
> 
> but for inktober this year, i found myself doing a few promptfics about these two, and i decided to write some more and collect them together. so, here are some pieces. in which i try to begin to put to words why this story makes me feel so many quiet and fragile feelings ;-;

  
  


#### 17\. prickly

It’s never quiet for long. Silent, certainly, but the air is too thick, too much like a gas leak to be considered quiet. 

His father reaches for the bottle opener. The cap clinks into the silence like a spark, like the flame from a lighter, and the rotten air explodes as it meets the fed-up sigh of his mother. 

Souji slides his fork under his remaining rice, moves a small pile to his mouth. Chews. Swallows. He isn’t listening, but that doesn’t mean he can’t hear. 

He doesn’t care, but that doesn’t mean he can’t feel. 

He’s never had more than a mouthful of alcohol, taken unnoticed on a clear, sunny afternoon. He wonders if it tastes better with time. He wonders if it always tastes like the air in the kitchen when both his parents are home; if the aftertaste never goes away but stays until it’s more terrible to not have it on his tongue, until it’s no longer a distraction but a purposeful way to drown. 

Does it taste like overtime at work, eventually? Does it feel like the wind on the roof during morning classes, when the sun hasn’t yet reached the pages of his book? His mother still wears a ring on her left hand. 

Souji isn’t listening, isn’t caring. He is eating his meal – bowing his thanks to an invisible chain for it – and he is cleaning the dishes. 

There are rings stained on the table and rings still on fingers, and the memory of yesterday’s quiet, quiet rooftop reaches through it all, a crack of an open window to let him breathe. 

The oxygen helps him. But it also makes the fire worse.

  
  


#### 27\. tranquil

Souji leans against the balcony railing like an unused umbrella against a doorway. His arms fold in struts, his shirt keeps its shape, dry. He is still. 

Mika doesn’t look at him all the time. He doesn’t need to remind himself that he’s there, doesn’t find himself expecting that he will be. It’s their apartment. There are some things that go without saying. 

“Let’s not forget, this year,” he puts out instead, leaving it on the wall beside Souji’s bent elbows, where it perches far above the cherry blossom trees that have since turned green with new leaves, and where there is space for the implication to evaporate. 

Souji doesn’t smile at him all the time. He remains retracted here, too, only the creases of his shirt ruffling in the breeze. But Mika sees him glance over, warm, and thinks maybe, in the stillness, he’s heard everything.

  
  


#### 25\. guarded

There aren’t many rooms in their apartment. Nowhere, really, to hide a conversation. 

Mika’s gone out to the balcony, lit-up phone in hand, eyebrows drawn tight in a grim look that grapples with something softer around his mouth, something as small as his voice, struggling to trust in a safety long gone. 

Souji stays where he’s sitting on the sofa, lecture notes laid out like a timeline on the coffee table. Mika’s half of conversation filters through the sliding glass in low stresses and rolling, indistinct sound. His pauses leave Souji wondering, quietly, in the way he won’t follow up on, what he’s feeling when his mother speaks to him. 

It’s not for him to ask. 

There is a longer pause, longer than listening, but Mika doesn’t come back inside right away. The glass remains pulled shut; the balcony is silent behind it. 

Souji continues his work, placing one word after the next, a walk along a path he must build himself. Sometimes it is a patient work, and other times it feels like plodding forward through a fog, but when Mika slides the door open and steps inside, he doesn’t look up, because that path isn’t his to shape.

  
  


#### 16\. clock

Forty minutes left, if Mika doesn’t want to skip his next class, too. 

Forty lines on two pages, held apart by silent fingers, a thumb unmoving as an hour hand in the center seam of today’s book. He hasn’t read this one, from the glimpse he'd gotten of it earlier, but today’s not the time to try. 

Thirty-one minutes left, if he keeps sliding his phone from his jacket pocket to glance down through tired, always somehow tired eyes. 

Souji turns the page; it passes over Mika’s hair in a whisper of words he can’t hear. He can hear Souji’s heartbeat, maybe, ear pressed as it is to his chest as they settle further, further into the couch. They aren’t moving – only brief motions at the edges of a book, brief annoyances tapped out on an arm – the cushions are just too giving. In this room, Mika might be able to fall asleep. 

Fourteen minutes… Ten… 

Five… 

One… 

Souji continues reading, book balanced on Mika's head. Mika closes his eyes.

As long as he stays.

  
  


#### 26\. flowing 

They go to the beach one day over a corresponding holiday. It’s cloudless and warm from it, and the wind searches their scalps like they’re ten years younger, hiding on an open roof.

Souji stores his hands in his pockets, fingers having to take turns in the corner where all the seams meet. Silence doesn’t have to be broken.

“Look at that,” Mika says. Because if anything, they’ve made habits of finding cracks before breaks, and filling them.

Souji looks. Across the sand and its small, sloping mounds, to blank flats and remnants of shells to the endless traffic of the waves. He doesn’t see anything out of the ordinary.

But that, it turns out – as Mika stands beside him, hands within reach and thoughts in his own pockets for now – was exactly the scene he meant.

  
  


#### 20\. double

She has hair as smooth as an advertisement and a spark of humour that says she sees through him, but really isn’t here to mind what she finds. Her hand is steady around her glass, steady on the edge of the table, steady against the side of his neck when their conversation turns. Mika’s thumb slides easily over her chin. 

The fingers of his other hand run through her hair, curling it over her shoulder as her thumb slides easily over his throat. When Mika opens his eyes, hers are laughing brightly, surrounded by an inviting glass-bottle scent and soft, smooth hair as dark as— 

She asks him what he thinks of the group that’s performing, looking for all her serious tone like the chairperson of a weekly work meeting. Not that Mika has any of those to be summoned to. 

He says their music sets the mood; he keeps his hands on his knees, back straight and held off the sofa. She says she knows the drummer and the lead singer; she keeps her thoughts between them, but doesn’t shy away from telling him that she’s here to support them, not so much to enjoy their performance. 

Mika laughs, watching an exasperated wrinkle disappear and reappear at the top of the bridge of her nose as she speaks. Her expression is settling toward internal death, and reminds him of— 

He tilts his head in question when the exit closes behind them. His hair falls in short waves around his face, shadows over the ones already there from the buildings. The one under his jaw smells vaguely like citrus. 

Mika nods as he leans in, closes his eyes to the answering touch on his lips, closes his mind to the way he neither gives nor presses forward, the way he breathes through his nose, the—

  
  


#### 21\. gift

Mika comes through the door smelling of someone else and lamenting his empty pockets. 

It’s the first time in a few weeks that Souji has seen him, but it’s not the first time within those few weeks that he’s been in: There are shifted mugs in the cabinet above the countertop, and rumpled clothes in the laundry basket, and an empty space on the bookshelf where the second in a collection has been slid out. 

Souji doesn’t expect Mika to come back when he goes. His return always smells as sweet.

  
  


#### 27\. chop

The door opens just as Mika’s finishing up on the last bit of onion. He gives a wet sniff, wipes his eyes on his forearm, and turns around, already smiling. 

Souji isn’t, when he sees him, but that’s normal enough. What isn’t— “I stopped by the supermarket on my way back,” Souji says, putting his own grocery bags on the counter beside Mika’s preparations. He glances over Mika’s shoulder, half assessing, half-assed greeting. “Thought we could eat here tonight.” 

“Funny, that,” Mika says between laughs. “I had the same idea.” 

Souji’s amusement comes through his nose, unvoiced, but before he steps away toward the sink, he leans his head against Mika’s, long enough for Mika to lean right back, _welcome home_ pressed briefly against Souji’s cheekbone. 

A little later, Souji continues to the sink, and Mika, humming, walks over to the additional shopping bags to see what he’d brought home.

  
  


#### 24\. muddy

“I’m glad to help you,” his friend says, “Really. But my mom’s planned to come and stay, and…” 

“I get it,” Souji says, and silently pulls up his list of possible places to go. “Thank you for letting me use your couch.” 

His friend shakes his head. “Not at all. Hope your place gets sorted out soon.” 

It’s vague, but that’s because Souji was vague in explaining his situation. There’s not much to tell without telling. 

Souji’s list is crossed out, because he doesn’t know many people. Or, rather, he doesn’t know many people who he might call on in such short notice. It’s not an emergency, after all. He just isn’t sure how long he’ll be away. Maybe he should start looking for a new place – Mika could stay in the old one if he wanted. If he wanted. 

The streets to the station are dark, soaked in rain, glistening under every yellow-red-blue light. 

As Souji waits to cross, he lays out his options like a fishing net, covering his upcoming weeks, but not covering everything at all. 

As he arranges a room at a hotel a district over, he hands over his credit card to tie up the strings, and as he sits at the small desk beside the single bed, willing himself to make sense of his needs, his hopes, his wishes, he grasps the knot, and pulls. 

It’s not much of a sieve.

  
  


#### 24\. breakable

Glass of the surface of a phone, dark; is the battery dead? The signal? 

Souji? 

Mika snorts despite himself, to spite the absence of humor in the situation. The sound stays in the room, echoing off empty walls. All the furniture is cold, and nothing is listening. 

This morning’s tea sits cold, too, weighing on the cold table sinking against the cold floor. Mika traces the indents of the cup sideways as he hangs over the edge of the couch. 

The cup, too. 

The sliding doors to the balcony. There’s no insulation there, so December creeps in like weeds he couldn’t grasp if he wanted to. Yesterday’s snow, peppered with tiny holes where the ice is melting down from the floor above them. 

The thread wound round his wrist, a phantom of Souji’s fingers, pulling in where he’d pulled away. 

Expectations. 

Routine. 

This silence, when he finds him.

  
  


#### 25\. drain

The ground isn’t solid here, sand grains sliding and bunching beneath his shoes. Souji plants his feet anyway, makes as a post in concrete as he looks up toward the pinpricked sky. If Mika weren’t holding his hand, he might feel colder – drier, maybe, darker. As it is, the night is dark enough. 

They’d never been on the roof at school at night. Souji wonders, with a dispassionate movement of air from his lungs, if the stars would have looked quite so numerous, or quite so disarming. 

“What are you sighing about?” Mika is with him tonight. 

“Nothing.” 

Mika’s sigh is ten times louder, and twenty times more intentional. His face, suddenly sweeping from periphery to foreground, takes Souji’s eyes off the stars. “Thought we were easy,” he says, not laughing, but almost. “What’s up?” 

He’s not old enough to have almost-laugh crinkles around his mouth. His smile isn’t old enough to have settled across his face the way it does now, a familiar invitation, edges creased from wear. Souji looks at him, not answering, and Souji isn’t old enough to justify the tiredness spreading beneath his own eyes; Souji isn’t old enough to forsake the world. 

The fact that they have done these things anyway tells enough of the truth. They might not be old enough to fill a night with answers, but they have found some within their years to live by. 

Finally, he says: “I was thinking about your happiness.” 

Mika’s expression scrunches up. “What’s that supposed to mean?” 

Souji still can’t say for sure. There’s no concrete around him, only sand, and the tide inching higher as they stand far beneath the spill of lights. 

“I don’t believe in that,” Mika says. His fingers are solid around Souji’s, and he holds on, eyes open, not quite searching. “But this... This is good.”

  
  


#### 28\. thunder

Mika’s walking past the break area ashtray with a lollipop in his mouth when he looks at the sky, the first time since coming in this morning. He runs a scene through his mind, last bit of hard candy clacking against his teeth, and leaves the stick in even as he raises his phone to his ear. 

“Souji!” he calls, a little bright for the grey carpet and semi-walls around him. Neither has he decided to dye his hair to a dark, neutral shade. 

“On break, are you?” Souji hadn’t been, from the way his voice sounds like a brief glance sideways and back to a computer screen. But he’d picked up, working from home notwithstanding, caller ID notwithstanding, and Mika feels lighter for it. At the same time, something heavy presses down on his chest. Some residual barricade keeps the sensation from budding. 

“Just a short one,” he says. “Just to call you.” 

Souji, as expected, hears the bluff, and is surely fixing the air before him with an unimpressed stare. “Your phone isn’t here.” 

Mika laughs. “I know, I’m using it to call,” he says. He gives another look over the sky. “Listen, it’s gonna rain soon, so take your laundry in, okay? You always get cranky when it gets wet, even though it’s your own fault for burrowing so far into your work.” 

There’s a rolling of desk chair wheels in the background over the phone. “Ah.” 

“I’ll probably be back the usual time,” Mika says, tipping the lollipop stick into the bin. “Should I pick something up for dinner?” 

“Would be good,” Souji says. “I’ll take care of…” There’s a pause, which Mika fills with an image of Souji taking stock of the laundry hung over the balcony to dry, and noticing that it isn’t just his. He grins. 

“Gotta go,” he says, “Break’s over. See you later!” 

Souji sighs in his ear. “You’re working hard. Thanks for calling.” 

Mika gets back to his desk with time yet to spare. Somewhere, a flower pushes through the weight of years of barren stone – as it makes to open from the warmth he holds close, he lets it, and calls it by its closest name.

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> o_o!! 
> 
> thank you for reading!


End file.
